From discovering FIRE to building a life around financial freedom
Our journey towards financial independence started back in 2013.
At the time, FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early – was a relatively simple idea to us. Spend less than we earn, invest the difference and eventually build enough wealth that work becomes optional.
More than a decade later, we’re still working towards financial independence, but our definition of what we’re actually trying to achieve has changed.
We’ve bought a home, moved abroad, returned to the UK, had children and made plenty of plans that didn’t quite work out as expected.
Through all of those changes, FIRE has remained a thread running through our decisions.
But it’s no longer simply about retiring early.
It’s about building a life where money gives us more choices.
Here’s how we got here.
2013 – Discovering FIRE
Where it all started
Our FIRE journey began in 2013 when we discovered the idea of financial independence.
The concept was both simple and liberating.
What if we didn’t have to spend the majority of our adult lives working simply because that’s what everyone was expected to do?
What if we could deliberately build enough financial security that, one day, we could choose whether to work?
We didn’t have a grand master plan at the beginning.
We were simply starting to understand that the decisions we made with our money could have a huge impact on the choices available to us later in life.
That idea stuck.
The early years – Learning the basics
Discovering FIRE sent us down a rabbit hole of learning.
We started paying much more attention to our spending, saving and investing.
We learnt about things we’d never really thought about before: compound growth, investment returns, tax efficiency, withdrawal rates and the difference between earning more and needing less.
But perhaps the most important lesson was that FIRE isn’t just an investing strategy.
It’s a relationship between income, spending, investing and time.
The less we need to live on, and the more we invest, the less money we ultimately need to become financially independent.
That led to one of the ideas that would eventually become central to A Way to Less:
Can we spend less without living less?
2019 – A Way to Less
Turning the journey into a story
Eventually, we decided to start documenting what we were learning.
A Way to Less was created as a place to share our journey towards financial independence – including the things that worked, the things that didn’t and the decisions we were making along the way.
We didn’t start the blog because we’d already figured everything out.
Quite the opposite.
We wanted to document the process of working it out.
Over time, that meant FIRE became connected to much more than spreadsheets and investment accounts.
It became about how we wanted to live.
FIRE isn’t just about money
The further we got into the FIRE journey, the more we realised that financial independence wasn’t really the end goal.
Money is useful because of what it allows you to do.
Financial security can give you the ability to take a risk, change direction, spend more time with your family, travel or simply say no to something that isn’t right for you.
That changed how we thought about the goal.
We still wanted to become financially independent.
But we didn’t want to spend the years getting there living as though our “real life” hadn’t started yet.
The journey mattered too.
2022 – Taking the leap
FIRE before financial independence
One of the biggest tests of our thinking came when we moved abroad to the Caribbean.
We hadn’t reached financial independence.
By traditional FIRE logic, perhaps we should have continued working, saving and investing until we’d reached our number.
Instead, we decided to use some of the financial security we’d already built to do something we’d wanted to do.
We moved.
It was a reminder that you don’t have to wait until you’ve reached FIRE before benefiting from the freedom that financial planning can provide.
Financial independence is a destination.
Financial flexibility can change your life much earlier.
2023 – Changing direction
Eventually, we returned to the UK.
It wasn’t part of some perfectly executed FIRE plan.
But that was another important lesson.
Life doesn’t follow spreadsheets.
Plans change. Circumstances change. Priorities change.
A good financial plan shouldn’t make you afraid to change direction.
It should make changing direction possible.
The experience reinforced something we’d increasingly come to believe:
The purpose of financial independence is to create options, not restrictions.
2024 – And then there were four
FIRE with a family
Having children changed our FIRE journey again.
Suddenly, the decisions weren’t just about two adults and their financial goals.
There were new priorities, new responsibilities and a completely different perspective on what mattered.
Our spending increased.
Our financial targets needed reconsidering.
And the idea of simply maximising our savings rate became much less important than it once had been.
We still want financial independence.
But we also want our children to have a great childhood.
We want to travel together.
We want to have experiences.
We want to be able to spend money when spending it genuinely improves our lives.
That means our version of FIRE has become less about extreme optimisation and more about finding a sustainable balance.
2025 – Finding our balance
As our family settled into its new reality, we became increasingly interested in what a sustainable FIRE journey actually looks like.
It’s easy to talk about FIRE in terms of percentages and targets.
It’s much harder to answer questions like:
How much should we save if we also want to travel?
How much is enough?
When is it worth spending money rather than investing it?
What does financial independence look like when you have children?
We don’t have definitive answers to all of those questions.
And that’s one of the reasons we’re continuing to document the journey.
Our aim isn’t to find the theoretically perfect financial plan.
It’s to find a plan that works for our actual lives.
2026 – Where we are now
We’re now well over a decade into our FIRE journey.
Our investments have grown significantly since we started, although the path has certainly not been a straight line.
Our current target is £375,000 each, and we’re continuing to track our progress towards that goal.
But the number itself is becoming less important than it once was.
We now think about financial independence in terms of freedom, flexibility and choices.
We want to reach a point where we have genuine control over how we spend our time.
But we’re not prepared to sacrifice everything along the way just to reach that point a little sooner.
That’s a significant change from the way we thought about FIRE when we first discovered it.
2027 and beyond
Still heading towards FIRE
We’re not financially independent yet.
And we don’t know exactly when we’ll get there.
That’s okay.
Our lives are still changing, and our plans will inevitably change with them.
We’re continuing to invest, keep our spending intentional and build our financial security.
But we’re also continuing to live.
We’re planning family adventures, travelling, spending time together and making choices based on what matters to us now — not just what might happen decades into the future.
Our six-week trip through Southeast Asia in 2027 is a good example.
It’s not something we’re putting off until we’ve reached FIRE.
We’re going now.
Because if financial independence is supposed to give us freedom, there’s no reason we can’t start using some of that freedom along the way.
So, what does FIRE mean to us now?
When we started this journey, FIRE meant one thing:
Retire early.
Today, it means something different.
It means having enough financial security that we don’t have to organise our entire lives around earning money.
It means having choices.
It means being able to change direction when life changes.
It means having the freedom to spend time with the people we love.
It means being able to travel.
It means having the option to work because we want to, rather than because we have to.
And perhaps most importantly, it means not waiting until some distant future date before we start living the life we’re working towards.
We’re still on the journey.
And that’s the point.
We’re not trying to escape our lives.
We’re trying to build a life we don’t want to escape from.
Follow the journey
Our FIRE Journey is still being written.
We’ll continue to share the numbers, decisions, successes, mistakes and changes of direction as we work towards financial independence.